industrial pollution – China Digital Times (CDT)https://chinadigitaltimes.net
Covering China from CyberspaceFri, 18 Aug 2017 02:20:12 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.135652790China Digital Timeshttps://chinadigitaltimes.net/wp-content/themes/cdt/images/feedlogo.pnghttps://chinadigitaltimes.net
Polluting Plants Shut by Officials Found Still in Usehttps://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/04/polluting-plants-shut-officials-found-still-use/
Sun, 23 Apr 2017 04:08:42 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=200144A recent round of inspection checks by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has found that a number of factories that were ordered to shut down due to environmental violations have continued to operate illegally. These cases of non-compliance highlights the monitoring and enforcement challenges that China’s environmental authority faces amid ambitious plans to tackle pollution. Bibek Bhandari at Sixth Tone reports:

The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) recently discovered that several factories shut down for “serious” violations of environmental standards had nevertheless resumed operations. Though inspectors sealed the facilities and seized equipment, subsequent checks found that some of the companies had disregarded the ministry’s instructions by continuing to operate, it said in a statement Tuesday.

A lime processing plant on the outskirts of Beijing was sealed during a previous check for not meeting pollution treatment standards and even had its equipment seized, but the ministry said there were “obvious signs” of continued use during its recent inspection. Some half-dozen companies in Hebei and Shandong provinces had also tampered with the inspectors’ efforts to seal off the premises and resumed unauthorized operation.

The transgressions were discovered during spot checks that the MEP teams had recently conducted in Beijing, Hebei, and Shandong. In its statement, the ministry said more than half of the businesses inspected — 285 out of 450 — were not adhering to pollution standards and operational criteria. While some companies had not conformed to industrial policy, or had started operating before their environmental impact assessment report was approved, others lacked proper pollution control facilities, according to the MEP. [Source]

China launched a campaign earlier this month aimed at “normalising compliance” in 28 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, a major pollution hotspot.

Tian Weiyong, head of the monitoring department at the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), said 4,077 firms had already been investigated as part of the campaign, and 2,808 firms were found to have violated environmental rules, 69 percent of the total.

China is in the fourth year of its “war on pollution”, but the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has traditionally struggled to impose its will on powerful industrial enterprises and growth-obsessed local governments.

[…] China imposed total fines of 6.63 billion yuan ($963.30 million)for environmental violations in 2016, up 56 percent compared to the previous year, the environment ministry said in a statement ahead of the Friday briefing.

It said it punished a total of 137,800 environmental violations in 2016, up 34 percent from 2015, in its efforts to boost environmental law enforcement and compliance. [Source]

The environment ministry and the provincial government of Hebei launched an investigation after a team of volunteers reported the cesspits, which had contaminated farmland in the northern province’s Dacheng county.

[…] “We are extremely open to all kinds of NGOs, the public and the media helping to provide oversight, so we can improve our environment,” Tian, head of the ministry’s monitoring unit, told a news conference to which foreign media were invited for the first time.

Reporting on environmental violations was a form of community service, he said, adding that there were 240,000 followers of the ministry’s public account for such reports on popular messaging app WeChat.

“We are particularly keen for NGOs to make the most of their unique capacity and to work on this issue from another perspective, by bringing public interest lawsuits in this area.” [Source]

China is also expanding its crackdown on emission from ships, which has been a major contributor of air pollution in the country’s port cities. The new Domestic Emission Control Area (DECA) regulations are set to expand the number of port areas requiring ships to switch to low-sulphur fuel at berth and near harbours. However, enforcement is expected to be difficult due to logistical reasons. Fung Freda and Zhu Zhixi at China Dialogue report:

Between April and November 2016 Shanghai’s enforcement agency inspected some 1,858 ships, caught 55 ships violating the rules and issued more than US$100,000 (690,000 yuan) in penalties. Two months after the regulations were phased in at four ports in Bohai Bay, two ships, including a foreign flagged ship, were caught using non-compliant fuels.

[…] The International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires ship operators to keep bunker delivery notes on board and maintain samples of fuel collected during refueling to demonstrate compliance with marine fuel regulations. But these are susceptible to fraud or forgery.

In addition, oceangoing ships – the main target of the DECA regulations – are typically equipped with multiple fuel tanks connected to the engines and or boilers. Even if there are tanks storing low-sulphur fuel on board, there is no guarantee that such fuel is being used at port.

[…] And enforcement is set to become even more challenging. By 2019, the regulations will be extended to cover all ships in the DECA waters out to 12 nautical miles. International maritime law prohibits stopping or boarding a foreign ship passing through a country’s territorial waters. So it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for enforcement officials to take fuel samples from a ship that travels through DECA waters but calls at a port outside the DECAs. [Source]

China promised last year to improve what it called the “rhythm” of construction of power transmission lines and renewable generation to avoid “curtailment,” which occurs when there is insufficient transmission to absorb the power generated by the renewable projects.

But Greenpeace said wasted wind power still rose to 17 per cent of the total generated by wind farms last year, up from 8 per cent in 2014. The amount that failed to make it to the grid was enough to power China’s capital Beijing for the whole of 2015, it added.

Wasted wind generation in the northwestern province of Gansu was 43 per cent of the total generated last year, it said.

[…] “Upgrades to the system are urgently needed, including a more flexible physical structure of the grid, efficient cross-region transmission channels and smart peak load operation,” said Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Yuan Ying. [Source]

Earlier this month, Wang talked about his latest project on the TED-esque platform Yixi. Wang’s ambitious investigation will track the source of the materials surrounding urban denizens: the stone extracted from leveled mountains for our bathroom sinks, the iron that poisons water and goes into steel frames, the coal-ravaged towns that power Beijing. Wang’s urgent message and shocking visual delivery echo Chai Jing’s viral film from 2015 on China’s choking smog, “Under the Dome.” For Wang, though, smog is just the beginning.

Both the CCTV report and the local authorities in Jiangsu province say children started getting ill shortly after the move.

However, they disagree on how severely ill the students are.

The CCTV report said out of a total of 2,451 students, 641 had medical examinations and 493 were diagnosed with illnesses including bronchitis, dermatitis, lymphoma and leukaemia.

Local authorities, meanwhile, say ailments were reported after the move but they list them as skin allergy, cough, nose bleeding, vomiting, oral ulcers and lumps in the thyroid glands.

[…] They said: “We invited experts to analyse the test results. Experts say thyroid nodule could happen to any 13-15 year old teenagers, and the possibility is 7%. The reasons are: insufficient iodine intake, too much pressure, instinct immune deficiency, drug intake; or virus affection, or immune system disease.”

No leukaemia case was found, Changzhou officials have said. Only one lymph cancer was found which was diagnosed in September 2015 before the school moved to the new site, they added. [Source]

Speaking on Tuesday, Ma, the director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, called for a “comprehensive and independent” investigation into how a similar disaster had been allowed to happen in China.

[…] Ma Jun said that in the wake of the Love Canal disaster US lawmakers had introduced powerful legislation that made chemical companies “extremely cautious” about the disposal of hazardous materials. Similarly tough laws were needed in China as the country embarked upon the massive redevelopment of so-called contaminated brownfield sites.

Ma said that when Chinese companies illegally dumped toxic waste they tended to dump the most harmful substances because they were the most expensive to dispose of.

“It’s all about ultra-high profits – illegal profits. So we need to make sure that they understand that [if they illegally dump waste] it will cost them not just a fortune – but it will cost them the whole company if they do that,” he said.

“The lesson from Love Canal and the experience in the west is that we need to have really powerful legislation so that polluters will take no chances.” [Source]

Nearly 500 students at a school campus constructed near the former site of several chemical plants in east China’s Jiangsu province have come down with health problems ranging from bronchitis to eczema to — in some cases — lymphoma and leukemia, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Sunday.

[…] According to CCTV, at the end of last year, shortly after the school’s new site was occupied, students started to display strange symptoms. Parents grew suspicious that the school’s water and air were polluted, the casualty of three chemical plants that previously had been located nearby.

[…] The soil was contaminated with a toxic cocktail of chemicals and heavy metals, CCTV said, including excessive levels of carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, and more. In particular, quantities of chlorobenzene – a chemical linked to brain, liver and kidney damage in high doses — were found in concentrations nearly 10,000 times greater than the national standard. [Source]

Parents of the pupils attending the Changzhou Foreign Language School had suspected for months the contaminated environment was to blame for the rashes, coughs and headaches their children began to develop at the end of last year.

[…] Parents had demanded the pupils be moved to a safer area, but the school management and local education authorities refused. Still, officials ended the autumn semester earlier than usual in ­January.

[…] “When talking to other parents, we found that almost all the pupils had similar symptoms, and we could all smell the stench. Then we began to suspect [the symptoms] were caused by pollution,” the father of one pupil was quoted as saying.

[…] Parents commissioned their own tests and found chemical pollutants including toluene, acetone, and carcinogenic benzene in the air, and excessive levels of manganese and fluoride in the groundwater the school was using, the report said. [Source]

The publication of the report suggested that China’s leaders were taking a more aggressive stance toward chemical companies at a time when public anger over environmental pollution is mounting, especially in the aftermath of a high-profile chemical disaster last year that killed 165 people in the port city of Tianjin.

But the incident also underscored the serious gaps that exist in China’s oversight of hazardous materials. While China has made strides in publicizing air and groundwater pollution data in recent years, it still does not provide data on local soil pollution or require companies to publicly list which substances they discharge as waste, a departure from international standards.

Ma Jun, a prominent environmentalist, said the government’s efforts to investigate egregious cases of pollution was a promising step. But he said China still had much more to do to rein in the powerful chemical industry. [Source]

About 80 per cent of groundwater in the mainland’s major river basins is unsafe for human contact, a survey by the Ministry of Water Resources has found.

The ministry last year tested 2,103 wells in the basins of the Yangtze, Yellow River, Huai River and Hai River, finding that exploitation and pollution from industrial and agricultural emissions were the biggest threats to water standards.

[…] Nearly half – 47.3 per cent – of wells tested were found to have fifth grade, or “extremely bad”, water quality and about a third had fourth grade, or “bad” water quality. None of the wells had “excellent” water quality.

]]>193273Study: China’s Air Pollution Kills 1.6 Million a Yearhttps://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/08/study-chinas-air-pollution-kills-1-6-million-a-year/
Sat, 15 Aug 2015 00:08:44 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=186133A Berkeley Earth study of newly released air quality data from 1,500 sites across East Asia has found that airborne particulate matter contributes to 1.6 million deaths per yearin China. That is equivalent to about 4,400 per day, and makes up approximately 17% of all deaths in China. The New York Times’ Dan Levin reports:

According to the data presented in the paper, about three-eighths of the Chinese population breathe air that would be rated “unhealthy” by United States standards. The most dangerous of the pollutants studied were fine airborne particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which can find their way deep into human lungs, be absorbed into the bloodstream and cause a host of health problems, including asthma, strokes, lung cancer and heart attacks.

[…The researchers] analyzed four months’ worth of hourly readings taken at 1,500 ground stations in mainland China, Taiwan and other places in the region, including South Korea. The group said it was publishing the raw data so other researchers could use it to perform their own studies.

Berkeley Earth’s analysis is consistent with earlier indications that China has not been able to successfully tackle its air pollution problems.

[…] The Berkeley Earth paper’s findings present data saying that air pollution contributes to 17 percent of all deaths in the nation each year. The group says its mortality estimates are based on a World Health Organization framework for projecting death rates from five diseases known to be associated with exposure to various levels of fine-particulate pollution. The authors calculate that the annual toll is 95 percent likely to fall between 700,000 and 2.2 million deaths, and their estimate of 1.6 million a year is the midpoint of that range.

[…] Much of China’s air pollution comes from the large-scale burning of coal. […] [Source]

The Times’ report continues to note that the primary sources for Beijing’s notoriously smoggy skies lie 200 miles outside of the city, a fact that could complicate Beijing’s promise to clean up the capital’s air for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Beijing has previously demonstrated success in scrubbing the skies when under the international spotlight, for example during the 2008 Summer Olympics, or during last year’s APEC Summit.

Study lead author Robert Rohde said 38% of the Chinese population lived in an area with a long-term air quality average the US Environmental Protection Agency called “unhealthy.”

“It’s a very big number,” Rohde said. “It’s a little hard to wrap your mind around the numbers. Some of the worst in China is to the south-west of Beijing.”

To put Chinese air pollution in perspective, the most recent American Lung Association data shows that Madera, California, has the highest annual average for small particles in the United States. But 99.9% of the eastern half of China has a higher annual average for small particle haze than Madera, Rohde said.

[…] As China started to clean up its air, limiting coal use, it would also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief global warming gas, Rohde said. [Source]

“This has been going on for five days now, and I am guessing that there are about 50,000 people here today, even more than yesterday, when there were about 40,000,” a Shanghai resident who declined to be named told RFA.

The protests have continued since Monday, in spite of assurances by the Jinshan authorities that no PX plant is planned for Jinshan, which is already home to a chemical industrial park.

Protesters believe that the authorities are planning to relocate an existing PX plant from the Gaoqiao industrial park to Jinshan.

Friday’s protest appeared to go off peacefully, with some police officers visible in photographs, but no clashes, according to the Shanghai resident.

“We are walking very peacefully … Everyone is here to protect their own rights and interests,” the resident told RFA. [Source]

The protest was held after the government decided to invite the public to review its latest plan for the chemical industrial zone’s expansion after some people had said online that there would be a paraxylene plant.

But the environmental assessment report released online by the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Science, with the authorization of the management committee of the Shanghai Chemical Industry Park, showed that no PX program was included in its development plan before 2025.

The district government released a letter to the public on Monday, reaffirming that there was no PX plant in the current plan and that there would not be any such program in the future.

Zhou Minhao, director of the management committee of the Shanghai Chemical Industry Park, confirmed this when interviewed by Jinshan News, a local newspaper. [Source]

The government’s search for a solution is likely to prove fruitless; its only option appears to be maintaining social unrest at a manageable and local level. For these environmental protests are striking at the heart of the Chinese governance model of ‘adaptive authoritarianism’ and exposing its limitations. The Party’s strategy in dealing with major environmental disputes that bring together local communities across all ages and classes has often been one of short-term appeasement. But when governments are known to make ad-hoc concessions to quell disorder it encourages further episodes of contention.

[…] The government has tried, and failed, to convince the public that PX projects are safe. Partly this is due to the government’s typically clumsy delivery, for instance a month before the 2013 explosion in Zhangzhou, the People’s Daily claimed that PX was “no more harmful than a cup of coffee.” Statements like these are only likely to make residents more skeptical of official pronouncements.

More salient are the low levels of trust— or rather the active mistrust— inspired by Chinese central and local governments, and companies. There is no evidence that long-term exposure to PX causes cancer, one of the protesters’ key anxieties, but Chinese have good reason to be disbelieving of official sources—the cover up and withholding of information about the deadly SARS virus in 2003 is just one example. [Source]

A court in central China on Friday began hearing a closely watched case filed by families who have accused a local chemical plant of being responsible for high levels of lead in the blood of their children and grandchildren.

Lawyers say the case in Hengdong in Hunan province is a test of the central government’s resolve to address the human cost of environmental damage caused by decades of unbridled economic growth in China. It is believed to be the first time a Chinese court is hearing a case involving lead poisoning in a group of children.

The trial comes amid a series of public interest lawsuits filed since a revised environmental protection law that came into effect in January enabled the submission of such cases and increased the penalties for polluters.

Thirteen families from in and around nearby Dapu town have accused Melody Chemical, a chemical plant and metal smelter, of pollution that caused elevated levels of lead in the blood of their children and grandchildren. They are seeking compensation, although the precise amount varies by child. [Source]

Reuters reported in May that of the original 53 families who agreed to participate in the lawsuit, most dropped out, some because of pressure from local officials. Dapu authorities denied any interference.

Dai Renhui, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, said: “This case will be a useful reference for other families affected by pollution, particularly heavy metals pollution, and give them the confidence and courage to use the law to defend their environmental rights.”

[…] Li Laiyin, a farmer who lives on the edge of an industrial park in Dapu, said he was unable to add his grandchildren to the lawsuit because he had insufficient medical records.

Li Wenjie, eight, and Li Xiongwei, 12, were diagnosed with high lead in their blood in 2012 and cannot sit still at school, Li said. “The government hasn’t given a thought to the safety of the people who live here,” he added. [Source]

Dapu’s lead problem made headlines a year ago in an expose by state broadcaster CCTV, in which the head of the township was shown saying children might have raised their own lead levels by chewing on pencils.

After the broadcast, which said more than 300 children had high lead levels, officials opened an investigation and Melody was ordered to shut down.

[…] On June 1, China’s supreme court issued a judicial interpretation which reiterated that even if emissions from polluting companies were within legal limits, they could still be liable for any harm caused.

“If courts begin to rule in favor of pollution victims more often in these types of cases, companies will be forced to internalize the cost of pollution,” Alex Wang, an expert in Chinese environmental law at the UCLA School of Law, told Reuters before the trial. [Source]

Expecting coal stacks and factories pumping out toxic fumes, I instead see farmland whizzing past the window as I approach Baoding on the high-speed train from Beijing. Even when driving around the city, it’s not immediately obvious what causes the pollution. The outskirts are home to one coal power plant that doesn’t appear to be in use, with no sign of workers and not a wisp of smoke from the big chimneys. Like an increasing number of plants in the province, it may well have been closed down as part of increased governmental anti-pollution measures.

Yet, on a bad day, Baoding’s pollution levels can rise beyond 300 on the air quality index, which is classed as hazardous for human health. On these days, the smog clings to the city like a thick grey shroud, and its residents are ghost-like shadows moving through the haze. Visibility for driving is reduced and headlights and traffic lights glow eerily, barely visible. Air is not something you can normally taste but, on high-pollution days, there is a metallic tang that catches in the back of your throat.

Despite this, many of Baoding’s residents appear hesitant to discuss the city’s new status as China’s most polluted city, and when they do, are often defensive of it. “It’s OK in Baoding,” Mr Zhu tells me, pointing to today’s unusually clear skies. He is manning a food stand outside a small restaurant; over a hot stove, he prepares thick savoury pancakes filled with vegetables. Zhu says that his version of this popular snack food is the best in the city – and although he spends hours outside every day, he is not worried about the pollution, asserting his faith that the central government is doing something to improve the situation. [Source]

After decades of growth at all costs, Ma says China is now at a tipping point. “The development and growth model of the last 35 years has been increasingly dependent on energy and pollution-intensive industries, but how can we go on growing all these sectors every year with double digits?

“I think its time to change and balance the environment and growth. If we don’t do that we’re going to suffer a hard landing one day very soon,” says Ma.

China’s leadership has promised a “war on pollution” to regain public trust, but it is the decisions of local government officials, says Ma, that dictate what action, if any, is taken against major polluters.

“It’s the local environmental officials that are in charge of enforcement, but they are subordinate to local government. Their heads are appointed by local government. Those who want to stick to the laws could be replaced. This is the very harsh reality. It won’t be easy to change that.” [Source]

]]>183766Drawing the News: The PX Equationhttps://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/04/drawing-the-news-the-px-equation/
Tue, 07 Apr 2015 17:32:42 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=182660Following an explosion at a chemical plant in Fujian, cartoonist Rebel Pepper has translated concerns over industrial safety in China into a math equation, in which the Chinese Communist Party is the unknown variable when paraxylene (PX) is multiplied by safety resulting in a product of zero.

The explosion ignited three storage tanks, and flames continued to burn through the evening, Xinhua reported. More than 750 firefighters and police officers responded to the emergency, the authorities said.

The plant produces paraxylene, also known as PX, a chemical used in the manufacture of plastics and polyester that has been the target of large environmental protests in China. The plant had originally been planned for the coastal city of Xiamen, but local resistance there in 2007 led to its being moved to a less-developed area about 60 miles inland.

The explosions Monday were the second major accident at the plant in less than two years. In 2013, an explosion ripped through the plant, damaging nearby homes but causing no injuries. That blast happened on the same day that People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, ran an article touting the safety of paraxlyene and arguing that the public’s suspicions were leading to a critical shortfall of the substance, forcing China to be overly reliant on imports. [Source]

The People’s Daily article referenced by Ramzy stated that PX was no more dangerous than coffee. While the health and environmental effects of PX production have been debated within China, some observers argue that domestic production is not safe due to less stringent safety regulations.

A street march broke out on Saturday in Boluo County, Guangdong Province, and three residents contacted by telephone said the protest had resumed on Sunday, when people again walked toward government offices in the main town, despite a police announcement issued through the domestic news media that 24 people had already been detained. The residents spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of arrest.

“We strongly urge the government authorities to reconsider the siting of the waste incineration plant,” said an appeal against the project that spread on the Internet in China. One of the Boluo residents who helped with the appeal confirmed it had come from there.

If the plan went ahead, the letter said, there was “the risk of an expanding and deepening conflict.”

The conflict brought into local focus a much wider problem across China: the chasm of distrust between a government struggling with mounting garbage from homes and industry, and a public that often has little confidence in official promises to cleanly dispose of that trash. The conflict is especially acute in southern China, which is dense with people, industry and expanding cities. [Source]

Chen said he was among protesters who marched about 2 kilometers (about a mile) to the county government office in Luoyang town Sunday morning. At its peak, he estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people took part and he saw police with shields and batons take away three people who had thrown water bottles at them.

At the county offices, an official came out with a loudspeaker to tell the crowds that the government had not yet decided on a location for the incinerator, Chen said, adding that crowds had begun to disperse. “We have expressed our opinion,” he said by phone.

Huang estimated that about 1,000 people were gathered outside the offices, holding banners and chanting slogans, including “Protect our homeland” and “Drive out the garbage incinerator.” Some anti-riot police holding batons guarded the area, which had been blocked off to traffic, he said. [Source]

A draft of the plan was published in the Huizhou Daily on August 16 and will be posted on the city’s housing and construction bureau website for one month. Specialist agencies are also conducting survey and evaluation work on the project’s environmental implications and geological conditions.

Government authorities will hold a demonstration meeting and hearings with the participation of local residents and experts. The demonstration and final decision will be made in accordance with the law and legal procedures, said the spokesman.

The municipal government of Huizhou will give full attention to the site selection and is soliciting opinions from all sides to make a law-based scientific decision, he added. [Source]

China today — as it begins to come to terms with air, water and land befouled by three decades of industrialization — bears some resemblance to the United States of the late 1960s. The Chinese are beginning to wonder, just as Americans did back then, whether “industrial progress” has come at too high a cost to the environment. Attitudes in China are changing.

When the PEW Research Center asked Chinese people in a 2008 survey to rate the seriousness of air pollution on a scale ranging from “not a problem at all” to a “very big problem,” 31 percent rated it a “very big problem.” In 2013, in a repeat of the PEW survey, 47 percent called it a “very big problem.” While these numbers tell us only so much, the trend is clear: environmental anxiety is spreading.

This growing anxiety is reflected in the rising frequency of environmental protests. In the past year, people have taken to the streets in cities throughout the country to protest the building of coal-fired power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, waste incinerators, and the like. According to Chen Jiping, a former leading member of the Communist Party’s political and legislative affairs committee, pollution is now the leading cause of social unrest in China.

[…] China’s environment is a disaster. But by casting a bright light on the country’s severe pollution problems, the crises of the past year have stirred a greater environmental consciousness in the people. At the same time, they have spurred the country’s leaders to take more aggressive environmental action. [Source]

The move is part of a plan published by China’s cabinet, the State Council, which outlined emission targets for a number of industries over the next two years. The State Council said that some pollution targets are not being met for the 2011-2013 period and that action needs to be stepped up.

China is facing a “tough situation” in hitting its targets for energy and emissions for 2015, Xu Shaoshi, Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission was quoted by state media.

One fifth of the vehicles to be scrapped will be in the northern regions of China, which have been the worst hit with air pollution. Hebei province, where seven of China’s smoggiest cities are located, has been ordered to scrap 660,000 cars that don’t meet emission standards. Up to 333,000 will be taken off the roads in the capital Beijing and 160,000 in Shanghai.

More vehicles will be scrapped next year with up to 5 million being removed from the roads of highly developed regions including the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the smog-choked region of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. [Source]

However, recent analysis of economic data by Wei Yao, an economist at Société Générale, found that “Chinese policymakers are getting serious about air pollution.” So serious, in fact, that those efforts are already hurting GDP performance—something the government has so far shown to be its biggest priority. Yao says GDP will slow 0.35 percentage points cumulatively from 2014 to 2017 because of air pollution mitigation efforts, and she expects the economy to take the biggest blow this year.

The biggest indicator comes from China’s industrial output—the output of China’s manufacturing, mining and materials sectors—where growth has slowed significantly since September, when China’s cabinet rolled out its air pollution action plan. Last August that indicator hit a 16-month high of 10.4% growth versus the same month in 2012, but industrial production expanded only 8.7% last month. That’s the slowest since March 2009, just after the financial crisis hit:

That slowing of output comes disproportionately from high-polluting northern provinces, which accounted for three-quarters of the 1.7-percentage-point slowdown in national industrial production since September. “Our comparison of all regional data shows that the more polluted the region, the greater the slowdown,” writes Yao. [Source]

Why this is important: China’s air pollution problem cannot be overstated. Things have gotten so bad that some cities have resorted to shooting giant water cannons into the air and confiscating outdoor grills. The country’s infamous smog is reportedly driving away foreign talent, forcing tourists to buy smog insurance and leading the wealthy to take flight. Air pollution levels in Beijing are 20 times higher than safety standards — and can even be seen from outer space. On top of all that, China’s smog is getting so big that it’s affecting weather patterns around the world and now hurting America.

The Chinese government has pledged to move power plants and clean up the air in cities. Unfortunately, not much has been done so far. In the meantime, 40% of the 7 million people worldwide who died from air pollution in 2012 were from China.

Under these dire circumstances, it’s completely understandable why the Chinese government would take such a drastic step — the question is whether it will be drastic enough. [Source]

Jia Zhangke, China’s most prominent art house director, had been preparing to make his first big-budget martial arts film, set in dynastic China, when reality intruded in the form of the Internet.

Specifically, Mr. Jia discovered the world of Twitter-like microblogs, which many Chinese have been reading in recent years to get the unvarnished daily news and opinions that are all but absent from the state-run news media. He was bombarded with news from all corners of China, much of it tied to the crimes of corrupt officials or businesspeople: rape, land seizures, industrial pollution. In many of those cases, he said, frustrated ordinary Chinese had been provoked to commit acts of bloodshed.

“I slowly began to see the problem of individual violence in society,” the soft-spoken Mr. Jia, 43, said one recent afternoon in his office in northwest Beijing. “There are many tragedies or societal problems in which people in the end rebel, resulting in a very big tragedy. So I began to pay more and more attention to this problem, because, frankly speaking, I feel like Chinese people do not really understand the problem of violence because society has never had a widespread discussion of the problem.”

[…] “[A Touch of Sin] seems to me a response to an emergency,” comments Beijing-based film critic Shelly Kraicer. “Certain things need to be said, and need to be said directly, clearly, to as large, and as activated, a Chinese audience as possible.”

The film, which Jia says has been only lightly touched by the censors, is due for Chinese release in November.

Thousands of dead fish have been found floating in a river in central China following a toxic spill, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday, the latest in a series of pollution scandals to hit the country’s water supplies.

Xinhua said 300 workers had dredged around 100,000 kilograms of dead fish from a 40-km (25-mile) stretch of the Fu river, near the heavily populated city of Wuhan in Hubei province.

The provincial environmental protection agency had identified the Shenzhen Stock Exchange-listed Hubei Shuanghuan Science and Technology Stock Co Ltd as the company responsible for the Monday’s spill, with ammonia levels found to be way beyond acceptable levels, Xinhua said.

Trading in the company’s shares was suspended on Wednesday pending an announcement. [Source]

In effort to keep locals calm, environmental authorities have noted that the Fu River is not a source of drinking water. However, the river is a tributary of the Yangtze. The New York Times reports:

Environmental officials said the river was not used as a source of drinking water, and they urged residents not to panic. Spills in China have often set off runs on bottled water because of fears of contaminated supplies.

[…]The Fu River flows into the Yangtze, China’s longest river and the source of drinking water for millions. Spills into the Yangtze and its tributaries remain a continuing problem despite huge investments in reducing pollution, [director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs Ma Jun] said.

“Even though it has a large volume of water, with 40 percent of China’s wastewater dumped into this watershed we are concerned about the health of this river and the quality of its water,” he said. [Source]

In Red Bean Mermaid, a mermaid tempts men into the red-dyed river outside a chemical factory into the water, and Throwing Pigs is a reference to the 6,000 plus dead pigs that floated down Shanghai’s Huangpu river in March this year. The Crooked Heart Mirror ”cannot be seen with human eyes but accompanies people wherever they go,” according to Satan, is an allusion to the different values on either side of China’s generation gap (代沟) and the problems that this phenomenon has created. Meanwhile, the Baby-Frog, with its terrible wail, is a comment on the forced abortions and infanticide that have tarnished China’s one-child policy. The Ti Ru Cow (or substitute milk cow) produces poisonous milk. Masses Fight the Ox alludes to the public frustration with huangniu (literally “ox”, but actually refers to ticket scalpers) who monopolise the supply of tickets for everything from train journeys to football matches.Tendon-pulling macaque refers to the problem of shoddy building standards hidden behind the gleaming façades of some of China’s new constructions. Stories in the Kiln features the ghosts of miners who died in a mining disaster, who require nothing more than an audience to be reincarnated. [Source]

Just as video games are today, woodprints were once one of the most popular art forms in Japan. From between the 17th and 20th centuries, ukiyo-e was the art of the Japanese middle class. Comedy, pornography, horror, celebrity gossip, landscapes, you name it, it has a ukiyo-e. And this style of wood printing didn’t just have a following in Japan. In fact, ukiyo-e prints were discovered by the European Impressionists in the mid-19th century, influencing the work of artists like Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and others. From there, the design language of ukiyo-e disseminated through the art nouveau and deco movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We owe much of the flattening design trends of the last hundred years in Western visual arts to the influence of Japanese woodblock prints.

Yet despite ukiyo-e’s worldwide influence, the craft in Japan began to stagnate. The introduction of German printing presses into the country over a hundred years ago made printing easier and cheaper, while ukiyo-e was expensive and difficult to master. As a result, Japanese woodprinters stopped commissioning new ukiyo-e art, and instead contented themselves with reproducing “classic” designs. And that’s the way it stayed for the better part of a century. [Source]

A few years ago, I was seated next to a professor of geology at Oxford University. We broached the subject of China’s resource assets. “China has very little that is easily exploitable,” he said. I asked about energy resources in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. He nodded, thought for a bit and then said “Well, but they are hard to get too, and at the moment and the Chinese do not have affordable technology that could do that. Same with Tibet. Everyone thinks it is overflowing with precious metals and all the rest; but it would be very hard to get access to them.”

[…] Only a lingering residue of Maoist hubris towards nature would allow people to think that this would be feasible with current technology. Describing the 2010 high-level work meetings in Beijing on managing the Tibetan Autonomous Region, however, Lafitte shows how this hubris creeps into central government thinking. Tibet, to them, is an area that has to be tamed with intense road and rail building programs and the same mass urbanization projects that are sweeping the rest of the country. [Source]

[…] As the scholar Shakabpa Wangchuk Deden wrote in the introduction to his master work “Tibet’s Political History” when he introduced Tibet’s natural environment, Tibet’s mineral resources have been referred to in popular folk sayings as mineral resources that are property of the demon, it was also said that mining activities will infuriate the demon, bringing about drought, landslides, earthquakes, spreading epidemics and causing chaotic famine. Tibetans believed that people are allowed to know where one can find what kinds of minerals, but as soon as one starts to exploit these resources, it will be like drinking expensive tea and wine in periods of wealth, the world will soon be corrupted and stripped off by taxes.

[…] Mining in the open, piling up mining waste in the open, what will the result be? The river running from the top of the snow mountain through Gyama county is called Gyama Zhungchu, originally, this was the only water source for local herdsmen, not only used for drinking water but also for irrigation and to feed livestock. But in recent years, the local people have not dared to drink this water, they have been going to fetch water from a different mountain quite far away. Last year I even heard that this once so clean and pure river water turns white like milk from time to time with foam floating on its top. A village cadre wrote on Weibo: “I have been stationed in this village, one cannot drink the river water…” Yet, for the mining area there is a special vehicle that drives to the county seat to fetch drinking water every day, so they don’t need to worry. [Source]